All lang style

September 10, 2004 — 10.00am

It's quiz time and our first contestant is a girl christened Kathy Dawn Lang back in the days when names had capital letters, especially in Consort, rural Canada.

Earlier this week, the now resolutely lower case singer k.d. lang, who once described herself in song as "a big-boned girl from southern Alberta", was presented with an inaugural and long-titled award by the Canadian consulate in Sydney. It marked her role in fostering ties between our two similar, primarily English-speaking cultures, both surviving in the shadow of the American behemoth. Or some such.

Appropriately, and with commercial astuteness, the Canadian award was presented as lang popped up on local TV, radio and print promoting her new album, a collection of songs by great Canadian songwriters such as Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen and Ron Sexsmith, and a 2005 tour of Australia where she will be backed by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.

Advertisement

But just how Canadian is she? We pose the questions. Who was the first Canadian prime minister?* "I have no idea," lang admits. Ok, who was the first Canadian-born Canadian prime minister?* "I have no idea," she says again, this time with a half-embarrassed laugh.

Maybe the consulate was on to something for you could argue that lang is as much Australian as Canadian with those responses.

"But I wouldn't know the Australian ones either," she protests. Ah, yes, but neither would most Australians.

Although she now lives in Los Angeles again, after a few years on the Canadian west coast in Vancouver, lang talks like a Canadian (and an Australian) when she explains why hearing as a teenager the nitty gritty of her native landscape described in song, after being bombarded with American iconography, made such a difference.

"Joni Mitchell's imagery and use of local geography, using it in a song, gives you a sense of starting to look at your own surroundings with a more romantic presence," says lang. "That does more for culture than anything, to allow the person to put on the glasses of romanticising and appreciating one's surroundings in an artistic fashion. It gives you this sense that an inseparable part of the consciousness of Canadians is the landscape."

Each of the 11 songs on lang's album, Hymns of the 49th Parallel, is there because it "formed" her, lang explains. But there's another reason for this collection, and again it's something which would resonate on both sides of the Pacific.

This is her effort to first of all avoid the obviousness of those brash if bland youngsters such as Michael Buble, and the craggy if no less bland oldsters such as Rod Stewart, who have trawled the very familiar "great American songbook" recently.

But just as importantly, Hymns Of The 49th Parallel is a defiant first marker in the quest to build a Canadian songbook.

"For me to go and do I've Got You Under My Skin and those songs is extremely lazy," lang says vehemently. "They've been done to death and singers should be cultivating new standards. The momentum of music has to keep moving forward."